Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Men Suffering A Drop-Off

By Hans Ostrom

“Something is
happening to men—their penises are falling off.”That’s the first line from a synopsis of my
new novel, Without One, which is available inexpensively on Kindle, free to Kindle Prime members:

The premise of the novel is that a strange new microbial
plague strikes in the near future.Although the microbe is a flesh-eater, it has a modest appetite.It devours men’s penises but is self-limiting
and stops there, leaving those affected healthy again but obviously not
whole.At any rate, the plague soon
gets its own acronym: RAPIDS: RAPID PENILE DEGENERATION SYNDROME, and RAPIDS,
as they say in Twitter-Land, is trending.

When I started writing the novel, I didn’t think the premise
was all that outlandish, given the history of satire.Gulliver’s
Travels does some wild things with the body, for example, and more
particularly, the protagonist and narrator of Tristram Shandy has his own phallic issues.I thought the comic, satiric, and farcical
implications of such a premise would allow people to move quickly beyond
certain gruesome images that might spring to mind, and as I constructed the
plot, I kept the gory details to a minimum.

But I had a heck of a time getting agents and editors
interested in the book.One well-known
agent who prides himself on being open to the most fantastical plots and
premises wrote back and said, “Sorry—too much, even for me.”A less well-known agent—another male—wrote that
he couldn’t possibly represent the book because he had a morbid fear of
castration.My response, which I didn’t
share with him, was, well, doesn’t that mean the book is marketable?I didn’t see the novel as horror fiction, but
horror fiction exploits people’s fears in a fictionally safe way, right?

Now, however, I think I have more reason to indulge in the
fantasy that Without One is a book
whose time has arrived, and I have the GOP to thank.They’re determined to politicize genitalia
and sexuality. True, they focus exclusively on women’s private parts, not to
mention their private rights.Apparently
nothing to do with female sexuality is sacred to them.In a roundabout way, via the issue of gay
marriage, they get around to male sexuality, but they are positively obsessed
with controlling women’s bodies, in my opinion.

But if you’ll notice, they don’t touch the penis, so to
speak.If males want to buy
contraception, they’re free to do so, without being forced to watch videos, have
their penises undergo a sonogram, or tell their bosses why they’re buying
condoms. (“Uh, we’re going to make water-balloons out of them.”)

According to the GOP view, men are also free to impregnate a
woman and then have her suffer all the consequences, have her choices about how
to handle the pregnancy limited, and so on.The GOP’s logic concerning
contraception—you’d think that, if they’re against abortion, they’d be for
contraception—makes an Escher print look realistic.

So it’s high time, I argue, imitating the self-serving logic
of the GOP, that we had a novel that shifts the focus from women and puts it on
the masculine member.

Without One
follows an ensemble cast of sufferers, journalists, doctors, epidemiologists,
evangelical preachers, activists, conspiracy-theorists as society struggles to
come to grips, as it were, with RAPIDS, which has almost everyone reconsidering
what it means to be a man if the man suffers a drop-off.The tale goes all the way to Washington
D.C., where it takes a detour around the wounded Washington Monument and amble to the White House, where the
president—one Luther De Long—has reason to suspect he’s been exposed to
RAPIDS.

Is he a Republican or a Democrat? The novel doesn’t say—because RAPIDS doesn’t
respect such boundaries.Respect
boundaries: what a concept.

Published by Congruent
Angle Press, Without One is available for download to Kindle on amazon.com.

Hans Ostrom is a poet,
novelist, and screenwriter.With Michael
Kerr, he co-wrote the script for the soon-to-be-filmed romantic thriller,
“NAPA,” starring Rose McGowan, Sean Astin, and Kevin Pollack. He teaches at the University of Puget Sound,
Tacoma, Wash.

Author of Three To Get Ready (novel), The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, and A Langston HughesEncyclopedia. Co-author of Metro:Journeys In WritingCreatively. Co-editor of The Greenwood Encylcopedia of AfricanAmerican Literature. Play the keyboard. Write novels and screenplays; blog. Travel a bit. Go fly-fishing. Member of St. Leo Parish, Tacoma. Husband and father.Member, Age of Aquarius.